Bloody Feet on Hallowed Ground
by WingedWolf121
Summary: Vampire!Erik. It was prophesied 300 years ago that Erik Lehnsherr would be killed by an Englishman. So upon receiving a letter from an eager young Professor of Oxford, who wishes to visit Erik's estate for research purposes, the only logical course of action is to invite him there as a guest. Charles/Erik


**A/N: Is it too late to post Halloweenish fic about vampires? Ah, well.**

**Disclaimer: No X-Men ownage here, and Marvel keeps hanging up on me when I try to negotiate. **

It had been prophesied that an Englishman would kill Erik Lehnsherr.

He had gone for 300 years without meeting an Englishman. His castle was many leagues from the Britons, and though he left it to hunt and, every winter, to grudgingly stomp his way over to the nearest city and persuade a doctor to come tend whichever villager had fallen ill _this_ year, these trips never took him far. He kept few servants, only Alex and Sean, both of them refugees long since fled from wars in the West.

He suspected the local peasantry made use of the fields he'd long since stopped tending. He avoided the woods, where wolves howled, and stalked the mountains for prey. He read voraciously, and occasionally extorted Alex or Sean to go to a larger city and steal him new volumes.

All in all, his life was quiet, remarkably free of white crusaders or weathered bountymen. It helped that he routinely ignored any correspondence from the official courts. He did not dwell on the prophecy.

This changed when, one day, as Erik sat peacefully in his study contemplating whether he was _really_ hungry enough to justify stealing a calf tonight, Alex knocked on his door.

"What?" Erik snapped.

"There was a grunt—the door was solid oak, and perhaps excessively heavy—and Alex entered the room. He was holding an envelope loosely in one hand. "Letter for you."

"Burn it." Erik ordered, somewhat nettled.

"It's er…" Alex fumbled with it. "Important. That is to say, it looks important from the outside."

Erik had known that his servants read his letters. He rolled his eyes and held out a hand. Alex scurried forward, dropped the envelope in his fingers, and retreated with a bow.

The seal was broken, but it had been good red wax, and it bore the Oxford crest. Erik prudently put on leather gloves and held it at the very edge of his desk as he opened it.

There was no puff of garlic dust or emerging sigil. It was a letter from a professor—a young professor, not an aging man burdened by secrets and perils—and he wished to inspect the grounds and the castle. He wrote that it was for architectural purposes. He wrote that he was from a good English family, and would recompense Erik amply for any inconvenience his visit caused.

Erik sat back in his great wooden chair and stared at his empty hearth, and remembered the prophecy. Then he found an inkpot and took the only logical action.

_My dear Professor Xavier_

_What a surprise this letter was. I had no idea that the stones of my family's house were of interest to the scholarly world. You are welcome to journey to my estate and examine the construction at your leisure, on the sole condition that you come as my personal guest._

Erik added directions, scrawled his signature at the bottom in a long, looping, hand, and called for Sean. He was not surprised to find both he and Alex waiting outside the door.

"Find a horse and send this courier to Britain." He ordered him. Sean's face flitted through an instant of confusion and an instant of fear, before a smug smile settled on his face and, with a triumphant look at Alex, he left for the stables. Erik supposed that there must have been a bet.

Erik tried to recall how many horses he owned. There must have been at least two, for Alex and Sean took a cart down to the village once a month to purchase their own foodstuffs, and they could hardly have pulled it alone. In daylight, yes, for both were hardy young men, but at night that road went through the forest, and it was a long road indeed.

"Alex." Erik said, diverting the boy's attention from what were no doubt vengeful schemes. "Prepare the guest rooms."

"Guest?"

"Don't be repetitious." Erik ran through the lists in his mind. That dilapidated old carriage needed to be restored, the larders stocked, a good mattress scrounged up from the bowels of the castle, and hot water, definitely, with soap and blankets. Far be it from him to let his would-be killer suffer discomfort beneath his roof.

He did not think, though, that he would bother to repair the roads.

The Englishman made fantastic time across the continent. Letters poured in from Calais, from Paris, from Vienna. It was all Erik's servants could do to stock the larder and heat the fires before Sean was trotting the carriage down the road, the gloss of the horses' coats shining in the sunlight.

Or so Erik assumed, having told the boys to groom his stallions well. He himself waited behind thick stone walls until dusk fell, then stationed himself by the roadside. It was the new moon, and it took no effort to be invisible. He had only to stand in the shadows, where the rocks and trees were beginning to encroach on the road, and draw his coat around his face.

The carriage rattled by a few hours later. Sean was whipping the horses, and they flew past him, black manes wild in the wind and hooves thundering against rock. The carriage itself hurdled over the road in a series of bounces, the wheels barely touching the ground.

Erik smiled.

By the time the horses walked into his courtyard, drooping and exhausted, Erik had been back at the castle for over an hour. He had not hunted, though he thought he would later. It would be best to keep his strength up. He watched from the window of a tall tower as Sean rubbed the horses and praised them, and pulled an enormous leather trunk off the carriage roof. It was Alex who opened the carriage door and helped the Englishman down. Erik watched them enter the house.

Alex came to him after the Englishman had gone to his rooms, to bathe and change before supper.

"Well?" Erik asked.

"Sick." Alex reported. "Tired." He paused. "Some champion."

He sounded more disappointed than relieved. Alex had never seen Erik fight. He must have been looking forward to it. Erik had remarkably little sympathy.

Erik gave routine orders for the Englishman to be escorted to the dining room, and that Alex deliver apples to the stables.

The Englishman did not impress him at dinner. He was a limp thing, with wilting brown hair and eyes which he clearly barely kept open. Erik noted that he neither attempted to steal a knife, nor felt confined by Erik's purported lack of appetite. He drank red wine and failed utterly to make conversation. Erik thought of the dread crone who had made the initial prophecy, and felt somewhat cheated.

It was not long before the Englishman made his excuses and retreated.

An hour later Sean, who was adept at climbing the walls, reported that the Englishman was curled up beneath his blankets, sleeping like the dead.

Erik went hunting, drank goat's blood until he vomited, and left a few gold coins for the sleeping shepherd. It was more for the mess than the goats. No doubt the natural predators of the mountains would take far more in the course of a year than Erik bothered with and after all, _he_ was the one who took care of them.

The Englishman slept later than proper for a holy man. Erik was wide awake and spent his day pacing around the castle, torn between desire to snap at Sean and Alex and indignity on their behalf that the great challenger was proving to be so inadequate.

At last, Erik simply sent the man up a note that he was expected for dinner at eight, and went up to spy on him, as was his right as host. There was only a sliver of moonlight, enough that Erik could hover outside the Englishman's window with a cowl over his face and be as invisible as in the last night's blackness.

The inside of the room was bright. The Englishman must have had Alex fetch every candle in the castle, for they hung in every holder, casting a golden glow over the room. The bed was a mess of covers. The big black trunk was open, and Erik could see within.

There were no weapons, and not a hint of anything silver. There were clothes—all fine velvet and brocade, or soft wool, nothing for a seasoned traveler or a truly monastic scholar. And there were piles upon piles of books, gilded tomes and leather-bound logs, anthologies and novelettes, yellowed and newly printed, enough to make Erik's mouth water.

The Englishman himself was missing. No matter. Erik could wait until dawn. The candles guttered as the wind blew in past Erik's back, and the Englishman entered.

He must have been bathing, for he was shamelessly naked, veins clean just beneath his skin. His blood pulsed at a slow, steady, rate. His gaze went round the room, sliding past the window where Erik hovered.

Erik watched his body. Was _this_ an English scholar? He was shorter than Erik by half a head, but strong, girded with muscle that moved smoothly under his skin. He stretched, and Erik saw the bands in his midriff, the depth in his shoulders, the coiled springs in his thighs. Here was not the wilting wisp of the previous night. Erik was glad he had fed.

This man had scars as well. Not bullet wounds or a saber's cut, merely evidence of a life spent at hunt in the English countryside, puckers from arrows and animal nips. He was an aristocratic type, then, not just a scholar.

The Englishman bent over, to rummage in his chest for fresh attire. Erik cast his eyes away, uncomfortably aware of the relocation of his borrowed blood, and swooped away.

The Englishman was far more animated at dinner. And Erik came to the unfortunate realization that the man was beautiful. The knowledge came between the man detailed lecture on Erik's ancestry—it seemed that the court, despite Erik's ire, had been sending out the routine death and marriage certificates—and the man's third helping of sausage.

Alex, whose buttling skills had come as an utter shock, had opened a window. No doubt the temperature had become suffocating for Erik had, in defiance, ordered a roaring fire built at his guest's back. Erik found to his own distress that the Englishman's eyes, which he had dismissed as the same eager blues which half the population of Northwestern Europe possessed, went darker when the night air blew through. They were deep enough to reflect the constellations in deep pools, and Erik waited for him to pull a crucifix from beneath his shirt and descend on Erik.

He did not. Erik had to suffer through more information about his lands than he ever cared to know, for the Englishman had mastered the skill of talking with his mouth full while not looking the least bit vulgar, but no harm to his physical faculties occurred.

He went to the cellar deeply uneasy, and ordered Sean to make a full report on the man's activities.

The Englishman slept late. The Englishman told Sean to call him Charles and tipped well. The Englishman had been in Erik's library and had been brought to paroxysms of joy by the editions which Erik had bought hot off the presses and which now were priceless treasures.

At dinner, Erik and he had great conversation about them. The Englishman presented him with a bound set of classic English works, and made jokes that were not holy. He told Erik repeatedly to call him Charles. Erik made indication that less than Count Lehnsherr would be accepted.

It continued. The classic English works were fascinating, if inaccurate. Sean reported that the Englishman walked down to the village. Erik found himself inexplicably worried about the wolves, and rode a horse down the road himself to fetch Charles back before nightfall. They somehow passed each other on the road, and dinner was an awkward affair.

Erik fed again. On a cow, this time. She was the prize property of the owner of the tavern, and the tavern staff had neither fallen to their knees nor made the sign against Evil when Erik rode into the village. Erik thought he might toss the heifer's skin over their signpost when he had finished.

He did not. He was, in fact, rudely interrupted.

This rarely happened to Erik when he was feeding, and even less often when he was feeding in a paddock behind the tavern, only a (very) tall fence away from the forest. Erik was hunched well over the cow's neck, the soft brown of her skin scratching against his lips, when there was a hand at his shoulder, violently dragging him away from the corpse.

It was, perhaps inevitably, Charles.

Erik rolled to his feet, hands up and nails grown long, his fangs long and white. Charles was staring down at the cow, the shock in his eyes as vivid as the moonlight they reflected. He looked up at Erik, relief and something more primal painted over his features.

The blood that streaked on his chin after Erik kissed him was as lovely as the stars.

He was not entirely sure how they made it back to the castle. Erik thought they might have flown. He remembered more vividly how he had physically flung Charles onto the bed, and how Charles had landed in a crouch and met strength with strength when Erik tried to push him down and take him.

Charles panted hot on his neck when he ripped Erik's jacket off him, too eager for flesh on flesh to wait for buttons and flaps. He would not let Erik suck his cock. By tacit agreement, neither of them bit, though Charles kissed hard enough for Erik to taste last night's wine. Erik gripped the man's hips hard enough to leave bruises and felt the blood in him race faster than it ever had while in the heifer. Charles howled like nothing human when he came, leaving white splashes over Erik's abdomen and the whole room reeking of sex.

After, when Charles, with English fastidiousness, had wiped off Erik's stomach and curled up with him in the bed, Erik pressed his nose into his curls and murmured stories to him, about backbreaking labor and cruel landlords, and terrifying courts ruled over by figures in white, and the way that daylight curdled skin black in seconds.

He did not tell Charles that his scalp burned, and that he smelled of meat and moonlight and wilderness, and that it was a more tantalizing aroma even than the first man the court had placed before him.

Alex and Sean, Erik thought, guessed the nature of the relationship. In any case, Sean ceased to refer to him "the Englishman", and simply announced him as "Mr. Xavier", and Alex's bows gained half a foot in depth. He deeply hoped that neither was foolish enough to spread it to the tavern staffs, who were now laying in garlic cloves around their house, to Erik's great satisfaction.

Charles, for his part, seemed less and less concerned with architecture and ancestry, Erik having informed him that the heritage of himself and several other nobleman in this part of the world was entirely made up by the court and that any papers to do with the building of the castle were likely entirely made up. It had, in fact, been designed by a man Erik hoped was long-dead, specifically for the purpose of housing his kindred.

"The walls," Erik explained, as he and Charles drifted about the courtyard "are exactly twice as thick as they need to be to keep out the sun. The cellars are below sea level. Every rooftop is made so as to keep half the yard in shadow all the time."

Erik talked to Charles as he had not spoken to a single soul in the last two hundred years, spilling secrets easy as blood. Charles rejoined with childhood tales, stories about colleagues in Oxford and his assistant, a bumbling genius.

Erik woke up one evening to find Charles splayed over him, having pried open the coffin and somehow picked the lock on the cellar door. Erik discovered he knew other forms of laughter than sinister chuckles and mad cackles. Sean's face when he found that he'd lost track of Charles and failed so completely to guard the cellar was almost as delightful.

It was inevitable that Charles announce his intention to leave.

He would return, Charles promised. He would come back with new additions to the library and bring the genius, Hank, another young man of good English stock, and fetch Erik a new coat to replace that one he'd torn.

Erik sat in his chair and watched the moon in Charles's eyes, and thought that he had been walking the earth alone for three hundred years, and that humans never returned.

Charles's pulse seemed to beat ever faster these days.

When he was first bitten, Erik had crawled back to his lord on his knees, begging for guidance. It had been winter, and Erik had been barefoot and in ragged dress, bitten for his fair face, and the cramps in his belly and ache in his jaws had rendered him immobile, forced to bury himself in the snow by day and stumble westward at night, drawn to the one who made him.

And yet…it was known as the _gift_.

Erik watched Charles's tip back his head and moan as Erik pushed deeper into him, and thought on the lonely centuries. He could not finish that night, and told Charles it was because he had not fed in weeks.

Charles wished to leave at night. He did not bother to bring his trunk, claiming that he would return for it soon. Erik mused on what a parting gift that cask of books would make.

In the end, Erik could not say if it was the ache in his chest at the thought of his lover gone, the sweetness of his scent, or the craving that weeks of being too busy to hunt had fostered on him. The doors were open, and Charles was smiling, holding his hands and telling him to fare well until he returned.

Erik moved forward quick as lightning and buried his teeth in Charles's neck.

It _burned_.

Erik staggered back, his hands over his mouth, hacking and coughing as red hot acid dribbled from the corners of his mouth. It was searing lines in his fangs and ripping the lining of his throat, pooling in his stomach like swampwater.

Charles was staring at him, fury mounting in his eyes. Erik fell to his knees, feeling the poison within him as burning fangs, tearing their way through his throat and into his chest.

"You were _different._" Charles snarled. It was truly incredible how the moon, now at the peak of gibbous, covered his pupils entirely. "I told them _all_ that you were different!"

There were lupine shadows at his open gates. He could no longer see anything in Charles's eyes but the moon and the night sky.

**A/N: Review? Pretty please?**


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